XML parser performance in Python 3.3

For a recent bug ticket about MiniDOM, I collected some performance numbers that compare it to ElementTree, cElementTree and lxml.etree under a recent CPython 3.3 developer build, all properly compiled and optimised for Linux 64bit, using os.fork() and the resource module to get a clean measure of the memory usage for the in-memory tree. Here are the numbers:

Yes, 2MB of whitespace account for almost 300MB more memory in MiniDOM.

Here are the graphs:

I think it is pretty clear that minidom has basically left the scale, whereas cElementTree and lxml.etree are pretty close to each other. lxml tends to be a tad faster, and cElementTree tends to use a little less memory.